"Families That Don't Recover"

Emily of After Abortion has a beautiful, and sad, post up about the kinds of family dynamics that can push a woman towards abortion.

The implicit message this daughter learned growing up is that "when bad things happen, this family does not recover".

How would a daughter absorb this message?

It could be that the parent's marriage is not satisfying, and the parents individually and collectively feel a sense of hopelessness about this. The marriage sinks into torpor, or uglinesses. Grace seems to be absent.

It could be that some tragedies or unfortunate events befell the family when the daughter was growing up, and the family projects a sense of never having recovered from this tragedy. (The tragedy could be an illness of an older sibling, a divorce, sexual molestation somewhere in the family, bankruptcy, and many other unfortunate or tragic events.)

Sometimes when I hear about a family like this, the family sounds like a once-grand mansion that has gradually sunk into disrepair and unkemptness, with broken windows, weeds in the garden, and so on.

In a family like this, there is often a sense of a before and an after. There's a time when things felt golden in the family (at least relatively speaking) and after a specific event or series of events happened, things became gray and the golden age is a distant painful memory.